Reinhold Rau

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Reinhold Rau (7 February 1932 - 12 February 2006) was a well-known South African natural historian. He was born near Frankfurt, Germany. He was trained as a fossil preparator at Senckenberg Museum and joined the South African Museum in 1951.

In 1969 he re-mounted the quagga foal, the only extant specimen in southern African museum collections. Dried tissue samples from the foal's skin, together with additional tissue samples from the two Mainz quaggas that he re-mounted in 1980/81, formed the basis of the DNA analyses that led to the discovery that the Quagga was a subspecies of the Plains Zebra, not a distinct species. Reinhold Rau was the pioneer of the Quagga Project, an attempt to re-breed the extinct Quagga.